Personality from the Perspective of a Primatologist

Abstract

(from the chapter) Although concerns about anthropomorphism and subjectivity have limited the widespread use of subjective personality ratings in primate research, recent developments show that subjective personality ratings of primates have acceptable interrater reliabilities and display good evidence of construct validity. The role of human personality dimensions or factors has typically been one of defining the taxonomy of human personality and examining relationships between those factors and multiple human traits and outcomes. We describe three additional areas in which subjective personality ratings may be useful within the context of primatology. First, when human personality factors are extended to nonhuman primates, interspecies differences in factor structure afford opportunities to infer changes that have occurred in the underlying behavioral correlations during evolutionary development. In other words, personality factors can be interpreted as evolutionary characters. Our studies show a close correspondence between the personality factor structure of chimpanzees and orangutans with one notable exception. We suspect that a factor in chimpanzees reflecting an association between aggression, emotionality, and unpredictability is homologous to the Conscientiousness factor in humans. Such a Conscientiousness factor is completely absent in orangutans. This chimpanzee factor may be a consequence of intense intragroup competition in male chimpanzees. Second, the highly aggressive disposition of wild male chimpanzees may also reflect a spectrum of personality differences between male and female chimpanzees. Male chimpanzees score higher than females on traits related to aggression, unpredictability, and emotionality, a pattern unlike that displayed by humans. Third, subjective personality ratings are potentially useful in addressing the disparity between current measures of psychological well-being in nonhuman primates that focus on low levels of well-being including pathological behaviors, and measures of happiness or subjective well-being in humans that focus on positive subjective states. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)